Feints and Jabs in the Penny Press!

 

Yet another banner issue of the TLS this time around (dated 6 August but only now reaching my benighted backwater of a PO box), and one with a couple of Open Letters echoes that involve yours truly.

The bigger of these kicks off the whole issue – someone named Caroline Blythe reviews two books on the great, bat-shit crazy Victorian polymath John Ruskin, and one of those books is Robert Hewison's big, beautifully-produced Yale University Press volume Ruskin on Venice, which I reviewed a little while ago.

I loved the book and consider it a masterpiece of Ruskin studies. Blythe pulls a standard book-reviewing sleight-of-hand, slapping the book's face left, right, left again, right again … and then calling it “important” or “impressive” or some such placid, portmanteau praise. It's hardly illuminating for a reader (to say nothing of gratifying for an author) to so obviously disparage a book and then backhandedly praise it. There's a figure of speech about eating one's cake and having it too …

The smaller of the echoes deals with Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, an odd, muscular little work I love more with every reading (and one I talked about here). Critics for over a century have maintained that one of the main reasons the play is 'odd' is because it's a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. As I mention in my own piece about the play, I'm not convinced – but either way, I get the impression I'd like the new Globe Theatre (Bankside) production a lot more than TLS critic Michael Caines did.

 

But the highlight of this issue was neither of these (they're just neat because we've touched on them before, and that's always a fun, eerie experience – you see such a piece in the table of contents, you feel a micro-second's irresolution, then you say, “OK, go ahead. I've done my best at rendering this particular book – let's see how you do”) but instead a slam-bang review by Claire Harman of Michael Sherborne's new biography of H.G. Wells.

I've yet to read Sherborne's book (its UK publisher, Michael Owen, may take that as a rhetorical sharp elbow in the ribs), but I could read Harman on Wells until the cows come home. This is exactly the kind of full, flowing, opinionated review that a wag once said makes its own object irrelevant; Harman is even adept at aphorisms. “The idea that he [Wells] owed nothing to anyone, even his own subconscious, was one he nurtured carefully all his life” is very, very good (actual Wells biographers have wasted whole chapters deriving that simple truth), and when Harman comes to Wells' legendary prolific output, she promptly outdoes herself: “At a stroke, Wells had both invented and almost saturated a new genre.” Oh, that's good stuff.

And then there's the little dagger in the letters page – a fierce, intelligent missive from one Tarif Khalidi that gives no quarter whatsoever:

Having just read the review of Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Hans Kundani, I wondered: Do either author or reviewer have any proper knowledge of Arab history, society, culture, or language? How in particular does one “assess” the impact of Nazi propaganda on the Arab world without a knowledge of Arabic, openly admitted in the case of the author (and reviewer)? Sad to say, the Arab/Islamic world is currently the last region on earth where non-experts can freely claim scholarly authority. Sadder still is that the TLS encourages such shoddy scholarship by publishing reviews that merely echo tired and tiresome Israeli propaganda, then go on to claim that the book in question is “important” in the debate (sic) about that tendentious phrase, “Islamofascism”.

 

That's fairly damning (despite the obvious fact that “Islamofascism” is a term, not a phrase) – we'll see what kind of response it draws from the author or the reviewer. I think it's extremely unlikely both of them will just sit quietly at home in the Cotswolds while they're called frauds. I'll keep you posted.

Keeping Up with the Tudors: The Other Tudors!

Our book today is The Other Tudors: Henry VIII's Mistresses and Bastards by Philippa Jones, a highly detailed and chatty volume originally published in the UK by New Holland and now enjoying a second life as an incredibly sturdy Metro Books remainder here in the U.S. (your local Barnes & Noble will have it in the Remainder section, not in History).

The typical line here is to go straight to poor Elizabeth Blount, who became Henry's mistress during one of the seething disagreements that characterized the second half of his marriage to Queen Catherine and bore him his only 'acknowledged' bastard, that epic idiot, that monument to mock, Henry Fitzroy. That boy was given lands and titles (not to mention that surname, which would be suicidal unless the king agreed to it) and even a kind of court of his own – it obviously pleased Henry to display him.

But Jones is far more assiduous than this, and she has filled her book with ill-begotten royal offspring – according to her, Henry had five sons and three daughters, almost all by the wives of other men. In addition to the normal tally (plus Fitzroy), there was Mary Boleyn, of course, “the other Boleyn girl,” and her son Henry Carey; there was Jane Pollard and her son Thomas Stukeley; there was Mary Berkeley and her son John Perrot; and there was Joanna Dingley and her daughter Etheldreda Malte. According to Jones, once Henry started fathering bastards, he quickly got good at it – instead of pregnant single ladies-in-waiting just hanging around until their due dates, he began to confine his more serious affairs to women already married to prosperous men, men who could then with a wink (and usually some lands or appointments to ease the humiliation) step in as the 'fathers' of all these royal by-blows.

The main strength of Jones' book is the digging she's done into the vast, tangled thicket of Tudor aristocracy. She's delved the family records and family alliances of hundreds of minor figures in the reign, and she's turned her findings into extremely readable prose throughout, as when she's giving us a thumbnail sketch of Mary Berkeley, the mother of that John Perrot some claim as the original for Spenser's Sir Satyrane:

John's mother's maiden name was Berkeley, and she had been one of Catherine of Aragon's ladies. Mary came from an old and illustrious family based at Berkeley Castle in Somerset. Her father was James Berkeley and her mother was Susan Fitzalan. The Berkeleys were one of the great families in the west of England. One of her cousins was married to the Earl of Ormonde, and her Berkeley great-grandfather had married the daughter of one of the Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk. One can assume that she was well-bred and possessed the talents that Henry found so attractive: she was a good musician, poetess, literate, lively, witty, and pretty.

 

Believe it or not, Jones quite easily makes 300 pages of this sort of thing entertaining – it's a helpful reminder that Henry's era was thickly populated with actual people, aside from him and his various wives (as some of you will remember, I touched on this very facet in one installment of “A Year with the Tudors”). The problem with the book is its overreaching, and you can see it right there in that excerpt. We don't know anything at all about Mary Berkeley's personality, much less that she was pretty and witty and a dab hand with the zither.  John Perrot was a big, beautiful braggart of exactly the type that pleased Henry VIII, and Henry showed that pleasure by laughing at Perrot's adult antics and in large part excusing them. There were rumors that Perrot was the king's bastard, and no doubt Henry knew of those rumors – and if he liked them, he would have done nothing to discourage them. This was a king who dreamed of being bluff and casual, and yet he was a chronic over-thinker who had a cancerous ulcer constantly suppurating on his leg. He was daily reminded of his own physical realities, so it's entirely natural that he would slyly enjoy the reputation of a begetter of bastards like John Perrot.

The problem is, there's no evidence. There's only what various individuals (courtiers at the time and writers ever since) can read back into the record by way of inference. Since John Perrot acted such the braggart, and since Henry smiled upon it, surely John Perrot was a royal bastard. The idea that such implications would only be made if they were flattering to the king – and that this, instead of their respective truths, might be the only reason they were made at all – never seems to cross Jones' mind. She never seems to attribute vanity or wishful thinking to Henry's character, or indeed any other aspect that isn't superlative (I lost count of how many times in this book Henry is called “magnificent” without any speck of irony). That an ailing king of niggardly virility would abet rumors of his own bastards in every county is pathetic but perfectly natural, and it's this royal fantasy that's on display here.

Which isn't to condemn the book, either in its particulars or its general heft. Those particulars are not definitively inclusive, but they're not definitively exclusive either – all of these alleged bastards could have been Henry's. There was certainly time, inclination, and opportunity in each case. The severe counter-argument – that if Henry's seed took so well, his legal wives would have been popping out heirs left, right, and center (instead of all those miscarriages and stillbirths) – is of course never examined here. But what Jones makes up for in credulity she definitely lacks in tedium: this is a lively, enjoyable book, regardless of where you stand on the merits of its subject.

And one one point Jones is indisputably correct: these were bastards who mattered. The alternate reality she paints is spot-on:

The question remains what would have happened if even one of Catherine of Aragon's sons had lived? Henry would have most probably remained married to her. Wolsey would have stayed as Cardinal, never quite achieving his ambition to be Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church would have continued in England. Anne Boleyn might have been a mistress, dearly beloved, but very easy to discard if he tired of her. Henry would have found a husband for Anne and most probably never set his sights on plain, quiet Jane Seymour. He would have carried on choosing his loves and likes, spending years with the same mistress whilst offering his occasional adoration to a range of charming, married ladies.

Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, might never have risen to such high status or, indeed, have ever been acknowledged. As Earl of Richmond he would have been a discreet if loveable ornament to his father's Court. Etheldreda would have been joined by Elizabeth as the bastard daughters of the King; Elizabeth too would have been fostered out to a suitable family and lived a shallow, blameless married life in the shadow of her half-brother Henry IX. Henry Carey would still have served; Thomas Stukeley would still have connived; John Perrot would still have blustered.

 

This is good, gamely stuff, and The Other Tudors has lots of it (you certainly get your money's worth for that remainder price-tag; this book, full of research and lively thinking, will cost you less than any of the trashy paperbacks on more prominent display in the same bookstore). And although Jones adopts a light, engaging tone throughout, there's a peculiar shadow hanging over the book's hypotheticals. Ordinarily, in any game of 'what if' there are better and worse roads not taken; we can imagine brighter and darker might-have-been futures for all our participants. But look at Jones' very likely extrapolation of what would have happened if, for instance, Catherine's first boy, little Henry, had lived. You'll spot at once the difference between this and most other such alternate futures.

In this one, every single person involved would have been happier than they were in real life. One of the darker Tudor legacies, I think.

Tudor Sea Dogs in the Penny Press!

Sometimes – far too infrequently for my liking – keeping up with the Tudors means keeping up with their pets, and last week’s TLS had a brief snippet on one of those times: a mention of “Hatch,” the dog-skeleton found on King Henry VIII’s fighting ship the Mary Rose when she was finally raised from the bed of the English Channel, some 250 years after she sank.

As the TLS points out, Hatch would have been a working dog, a ratter: Tudor sailors believed having a cat on board was bad luck. Since cats rat by stealth and patience and ratting dogs just bull in and kill their quarry, it stands to reason a) Hatch had the Mary Rose reasonably rat-free in very little time, probably while the vessel was still fitting out in Portsmouth harbor (no whole, drowned rat-remains were found on the ship, only tiny – knawed upon? – fragments) and b) Hatch got very little in the way of other exercise or proper diet – the flat feet of the skeleton hint at quite a bit of time either pacing the decking or else pacing a cage.

Nevertheless, Hatch was a warrior dog: he was on board the Mary Rose when she launched to counter a massive French invasion in 1545. The ship was a huge state-of-the-art seaborne blunderbuss of 700 tons, and she might have proved a terror to the French had she not been under the command of that prize-winning booby, that bumptious, officious moron, that dolt of the first rank, George Carew.  Impressed as always with empty bluster, Henry VIII gave Carew command of the Portsmouth fleet entrusted with repelling the French (as symbol of his authority - and in characteristically snide Tudor reference to a proclivity of Carew’s best not mentioned in front of the children – he was given a golden whistle).

Carew took command on the Mary Rose about a day before he was supposed to fight her against seasoned French warships. By that point his vessel had already been dangerously overloaded (not least by Carew himself, who’d taken the liberty of having nine-tenths of his worldly goods loaded on board already, including extensive wardrobes, furniture, gold plate, and for all we know, the very stones and wooden beams of his home estate back in the country), and that overloading got worse, with fighting men packed on board far in excess of the number who could ever be effectively used in combat. These men were unknown to Carew – half of them were unknown to naval service – and the result may have been a merry, cheering sight in dock, but it could only spell disaster once you needed to get something done.

And so it proved. The Mary Rose launched in July of 1545 and promptly started listing. George Carew had just enough time to call out to a nearby vessel that favorite canard of bad commanders everywhere – “It’s the crew’s fault!” – before he and nearly everyone under his command went to their watery graves – including poor Hatch, who got his nickname from the modern excavators who found his remains near a carpenter’s cabin, leading some to wonder if he wasn’t shut into a cabinet when he drowned.

However it happened, Hatch’s mortal remains are now on display for the public, and while they’re gawping, they ought to remember that this little skeleton represents a gigantic chunk of the Tudor world of which we seldom see anything: the animals. Horses, sheep, pigs (including pet pigs), birds, rats, mice, and innumerable cats and dogs surrounded every single individual in Tudor times, from the lowliest commoner to the highest minister. It was a world filled with their noises, their smells, and their unfailing tendency to provide companionship and provoke affection. When we think of the era, we sometimes too easily think of the rich clothing and polished pewter of the most familiar Holbein portraits and mentally edit out that other society, off to the side, pawing the earth impatiently, or licking its paws, or simply watching with apparent indifference while traitors’ heads were chopped off.

Although you can 100 percent believe the sketch of George Carew’s officious, dimwitted mug done by Holbein – in that he was, as always, entirely accurate.

Penguins on Parade: The Complete Poems of Thomas Wyatt!

Some Penguin Classics feel almost like consolation prizes, and the lovely, rock-solid R. A. Rebholz edition of the complete poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt must certainly be considered one of those. This is no slight to Rebholz, who’s as creepily thorough and methodical an editor as only the tepid undergrowth of academia could produce. His clarifications leave one breathless:

In this edition, I have divided the poems into two sections: those in Wyatt’s hand, with revisions in his hand, or attributed to him in the sixteenth century, and those attributed to him after the sixteenth century. While I do not know with precision the dates in which manuscripts containing ‘sections’ of Wyatt’s poems were compiled, his poems were certainly written in them before 1600. In effect, then, I am distinguishing between poems for which there is external evidence of authorship in the form of Tudor attributions and poems ascribed to Wyatt by modern editors and critics on grounds of attitude, style, or presence in a manuscript that contains poems attributed to him. The different degrees of reliability of the external evidence render impossible any absolute certainty that all the poems in the fist section are in fact by Wyatt; and it is indeed possible that some or many of the poems in the second section are his: readers acquainted with Wyatt and the criticism of his poems may well think that CCXI and CCXVI are by him. The second item in the note on each poem presents the external evidence for his authorship, if any; I do not bother to call attention to the absence of such evidence unless the attribution seems particularly far-fetched.

And it isn’t for the sake of Wyatt’s verse itself that he would in all likelihood breathe a little second-best sigh at the sight of this volume. Wyatt wrote poems his whole life, from his early teens to his distracted prime of life, and that verse was pollinated by the sweet bees of the Renaissance a-borning. Wyatt was born in 1503 (in a castle purchased in 1492 by his parvenu father, who had bet his and his family’s entire future on picking the right horse in the Lancastrian sweepstakes – he picked Henry VII, suffered some for it, and was subsequently richly rewarded when his horse won), and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he’d traveled to much of Europe and Italy and met many of its leading intellectuals and poets. Even a dense, witless man, having supped with Machiavelli and emptied wine bottles with Ariosto, would have felt the rush of new literary airs in his nostrils, and Thomas Wyatt (unlike his castle-buying father) was not at all a dense, witless man.

In Italy and France, he found a creative world bursting with new ideas and new interpretations of old ideas, and all of it mixed with his own poet’s soul (and the natural Tudor-era pigheaded English competitiveness) and made him long to make something new in English verse. Terza rima runs headlong into iambic tetrameter, and behind the veil we can almost see a charmingly incongruous picture of the fleshy-faced, eagle-eyed, hard-handed young Wyatt bent over his candlelight, parsing styles and indifferently counting out syllables. His verses are free of outright scholarship (thank the lord – only poetic genius a couple of orders of magnitude greater than Wyatt's can render scholarship into art, and the failures are gruesome to look upon), but oh, they still whiff of the sheer work that went into them – work and passion:

If amorous faith in heart unfeigned,
A sweet languor, a great lovely desire,
If honest will kindled in gentle fire,
If long error in a blind maze chained,
If in my visage each thought depainted,
Or else in my sparkling voice lower or higher
Which now fear, now shame, woefully doth tire,
If a pale colour which love hath stained,
If to have another than myself more dear,
If wailing or sighing continually,
With sorrowful anger feeding busily,
If burning afar off and freezing near
Are case that by love myself I destroy,
Yours is the fault and mine the great annoy.

Wyatt was writing in the full flood of a tradition even while he tried his best to English that tradition. Incongruities, as a result, crop up repeatedly (hence Gerald Bullett’s oft-repeated characterization of Wyatt – and his friend the Earl of Surrey – as ‘silver’ poets of the age rather than ‘gold’). But when Wyatt managed to match the lovely verse-precision he found in Italy with the particularly angry little snarl that animates so much Tudor writing (even civil court records often seem to spit off the page), he is unstoppable, the first clear clarion in English verse since Chaucer:

Hate whom ye list for I care not.
Love whom ye list and spare not.
Do what ye list and dread not.
Think what ye list and fear not.
For as for me I am not
But even as one that recketh not
Whether ye hate or hate not,
For in your love I dote not.
Wherefore I pray you forget not
But love whom ye list and spare not.

These and other verses (Rebholz’s edition is by far the greatest one-volume, common reader-friendly one there is or is ever likely to be: its acquisition by Penguin in 1978 was a typically decisive coup on their part) are the things that warrant Wyatt a Penguin Classic, and they’re the things that make it a Classic worth multiple bookmarks, worth tape-reinforcing, worth carrying into the sunny recesses of a nearby park on a warm day in order to proclaim these verses aloud as they demand.

But it’s a consolation prize anyway. Writing these poems, powerful and moving as so many of them are, was a pastime for Wyatt, as he would have been the first to admit. He was a vain man (as indeed is any man worth his spit, although the object of that vanity differs from person to person), so he wouldn’t disavow remembrance 500 years after his llifetime. But he’d hold his greatest achievement to be not literary but actuary: he survived.

Wyatt first entered Henry VIII’s court as an ewer at the age of 13 in 1516. At age 17 he married Elizabeth Brooke, the daughter of Lord Cobham, and his son Thomas was born rather hastily after that. All through the early 1520s, he and a coterie of other young bucks were always with the King, hunting, hawking, wrestling, jesting, composing music and riddles and poems, jesting loudly at late hours, jousting in elaborate tournaments (whose sheer violence would astound even faithful viewers of HBO’s The Tudors) – being boys together, and with that one inescapable feature of boyhood gangs: a magnetic, capricious leader.

Henry had been raised in the stiff formality of his father’s court, groomed for some high calling (ironists like to point to the Church) while his older brother Arthur studied kingship. The rarefied air of pomp was always bad for the Tudor brain (which had been programmed from time immemorial with more pragmatic data, like the smell of well-groomed horseflesh or the little gasp your man makes just as your dagger goes into his ear), breeding suspicion and false bonhomie in unhealthy tandem. Henry had it worse than any other Tudor, but in the early 1520s, it was possible for his boon companions , blinded by the genuine joy the young king could be, to miss the crucial fact that they were playing, as it were, with fire.

Wyatt more than any of them, because his aforementioned fleshy face and hard eyes were, in his 20s, matched with a lithe, muscular body and a lancing quick wit – he seemed every inch the king that Henry was, and around 1525 that fact caught the eye of a young lady-in-waiting named Anne Boleyn. She was fresh returned from the glittering court of France and thought she was free to have young men catch her eye, but in the 1520s she was beginning to conceive a bigger game at hand. True, courtiers like Wyatt were more or less openly besotted with her – but so was Henry himself, and his every nerve-ending was hyper-sensitive to any hint of competition.

In 1525, Wyatt divorced his wife, claiming she was unfaithful to him. In early 1526 he was sent on an embassy to France, and in 1527 he went on another embassy, this time to Italy. When he returned, in May of 1527, the fruits of his absence were in full bloom: Henry’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn, for two years unrivalled, was now the world’s most open secret.

Poor humiliated Queen Katherine asked the newly-returned poet to make her a translation of Petrarch’s Of the Remedies of Hard Fortune, and he set to work immediately. At a strong, growled word from Henry, he instead presented the Queen with a translation of Plutarch’s Peace of Mind. At his presentation, Wyatt was forced to plead that Petrarch’s verse was beyond him, and the King hoped his stubbornly righteous Queen got the point of her new text.



Wyatt was at the court again for a little over a year, making jokes at banquets, bantering word-play with other courtiers (only seldom now with the King, who less and less liked being shown up even in the friendliest of rivalries, not that he’d ever liked it much), and naturally conversing often with Anne Boleyn. Often enough that in 1528 he was ‘awarded’ the High Marshalship of Calais and required to stay there for two years. Upon his return, he was given some friendly advice by his new friend Thomas Cromwell, “go well they who go easy,” and some more pointed advice by his old friend the Royal kennel-keeper, that a lead dog will often castrate a rival before killing him.

He minded himself, and he was the picture of outward decorum when he – and the usual gaggle of courtiers – accompanied Henry and Anne to Calais in 1532. The next year he served at Anne’s coronation. There could scarcely be a clearer indication of the royal favor in which he stood, but in 1534 he got it: in May of that year, during a half-drunken fracas with the Sergeants of London, Wyatt managed to kill one of those worthies and was hauled off to Fleet prison in shame. And fifteen days later he was ordered released, pardoned, and granted the lifetime military command of Kent, plus the very pretty permission to fit out twenty men with his personal livery (he even asked the old kennel-keeper to be one of his twenty).

Honors continued to accrue (High Steward of the Abbey of West Malling, owner of Aryngden Park on let from the King, knighted, etc.), even while the sky darkened for all of his former fellow boon-companions. In 1536, Anne miscarried, and the last vestiges of the spell she’d cast over Henry slipped away. Into the void of his infatuation now rushed ice-cold vengeance, and a commission was placed in Cromwell’s hands to bring down Queen Anne. The method was to manufacture adulteries - and adulterers: William Brereton, Henry Norris, Francis Weston … even Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s brother … all were arrested and charged with having been her lovers. Anyone who had ever shared a wink or a knowing smile with Henry over this woman was now a galling reminder to him that he had once hoped for sons from her.

Nobody had smiled more on this point than Wyatt (they were smiles of pure self-defence), and he was arrested too – although separate from the others and never quite charged with them), parked in a Tower cell with an unobstructed view of Anne’s head getting sheared off, easy to hear the anguished cries of Brereton, Norris, Weston and the others as they were brought to their slaughter.

But he was freed. Freed, and given more honors – stewardships, livings, titles, and missions: in 1537 he was sent to court of the emperor Charles V and spent two years in Spain trying to keep Charles out of any alliance that might be harmful to England. He failed: Charles and the French king signed a ten-year peace treaty that completely excludes England, and Wyatt was accused by fellow commissioners of uttering treasonous quips about Henry during negotiations. Cromwell was again charged with trying the whole business, and in 1538 he found Wyatt innocent and dropped all the charges. In 1538 Wyatt was sent as ambassador to Charles again, again producing no positive results. That Henry’s foreign hopes were being frustrated at every turn is clear; his personal hopes were also, more famously, going nowhere: Jane Seymour had died giving him his sought-after heir, and in 1540 Henry was repulsed by the physical appearance of Anne of Cleves into hastily annulling their marriage.

Cromwell had championed that marriage and much of that foreign policy, and he was made to pay for the failure of all of it with his head. He was executed on 28 July (the day Henry married Catherine Howard), and before he died he cried out to his friend Wyatt in the crowd – legend has it that Wyatt’s tears prevented him from answering, although it’s difficult to imagine what answer he could have given that wouldn’t have been either a lie or a stupid lie.

Half a year later, Wyatt was arrested again, at Hampton Court, on the same charges that had been brought against him in 1538. This was a pattern as clear as any that ever involved Henry – and as deadly: the obviously vacated charges followed by the vicious charade of a trial, and then the axe. This pattern was not surprising to any at court, because all knew the angry, tactile, hungrily vindictive thing Henry had become. One by one, virtually every single person who’d ever been close to Henry in any capacity had been caught in the jaws of that pattern and utterly destroyed. As Wyatt sat in chains awaiting his trial, he could see the initials carved into the stone walls of his chamber – carved with desperate workings hour after hour by all who had preceded him in thinking themselves out of danger with this King.

And yet, he was acquitted. Acquitted, and showered with more honors. When Henry executed Catherine Howard, he gave Wyatt many of the livings and positions that had been held by Thomas Culpeper, her accused lover. He was given royal manors in many counties. And when the emperor sent an envoy to Falmouth, Wyatt was given the embassy to ride out in haste and greet the man.

He fell ill during that ride and died on 11 October of 1542, thick in the King’s business to the end, but it isn’t even that service he’d likely call his life’s great achievement: no, the neatest trick of his entire life was the sheer tenacity of managing to get through it. Time and again, bad luck and royal suspicion brought him right to the precipice. Time and again, he watched men and women more powerful than he fall off that lethal edge. But somehow, every time, a weird and loyal luck saw him through. Brought alive today and presented with this lovely Penguin Classic of his verses, he would likely grunt and say, “Yes, but mainly I lived.” He’d mean it in all senses of the word, and he'd count that his best monument, and he sometimes risked its mention:

Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty!
Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.
But they that sometime liked my company
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
Lo, what a proof in light adversity!
But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends and so be but few else.

Anne Boleyn!

Our book today is Marie Louise Bruce's remarkable 1972 biography Anne Boleyn, and it's remarkable for two noteworthy reasons, the second more noteworthy than the first. The one reason is that this was Marie Louise Bruce's first work of serious history, yet it's extremely readable and very well researched. And the other reason is that the thing is an extended defense of its subject. Bruce sees Anne Boleyn in the round - she's never shy of citing a fault or flaw - but she ultimately likes Henry VIII's bewitching wife and dislikes how historians from Anne's day to this have piled opprobrium on the poor girl's pretty head.

You don't see much of that in modern scholarship. Anne Boleyn is usually good and properly hated - for her ambition, for her coquettish ways, for her willingness to see Henry discard his lawfully wedded wife Katherine in order to take up with her, and for lots of other reasons besides. In the cold winter light of historical hindsight, she seems to stand on a small stage with the handful of other figures whom it's acceptable to condemn whole-heartedly.

Not so Bruce, who's done a great deal of research but isn't wary of tweaking it here and there to suit her main purpose, which is to present as favorable a portrait of Anne as that research will allow. Take for instance a tiny incident in days when she was just a courtesan and not yet a queen:

By the autumn of 1528 Lutheran books, printed in Antwerp, Mechlin and Brussels and hidden in cargoes smuggled in from the Low Countries, were secretly and avidly being read at Court. Anne carelessly left her copy of William Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man lying about in the recess of one of her windows. Here it was seen and borrowed by the suitor of her lady-in-waiting, Anne Gainsford. Dr Sampson, the Dean of the King's Chapel, removed it from the young man and, doubtless with a look of horror, gave it to [Cardinal] Wolsey, who took it to the King. King Henry, the Cardinal knew, equated heretics with rebels, and hated both equally.

This is true partisanship massaging the facts. The real Anne Boleyn never did a careless thing in her life, including this time: she left that book in plain sight hoping it would be brought to the King - she never for an instant doubted her power over him, and she used this incident to gain the whip-hand over Wolsey. When Anne learned of what Wolsey had done, she famously snarled "Well, it shall the dearest book that ever Dean or Cardinal took away,"and even Bruce admits that she never forgot a slight and was invariably ruthless to those she perceived as her enemies:

To those who worked in her interests, Anne was generous; remorseless to those who worked against her. Henceforward [after July 1529] she would not rest until she had persuaded Henry to wreak vengeance upon the Cardinal. And though Henry, remembering Wolsey's long efficient service,had earlier in the year been inclined to disregard Anne's suspicions, after the disastrous end to the trial he too was ready enough to find a scapegoat.

But despite all this, when Bruce's narrative comes to the tawdry drama that terminated Anne Boleyn's reign and life - her trial for adultery and treason, in which she was accused of sleeping with a baker's dozen men, including her own brother - the ersatz queen finds no more staunch defender than her biographer, who ends her account with this little declaration:

To believe in the innocence of the woman who catapulted England into the Reformation became part of the Protestant credo. Was she innocent? I believe she was. But proof, of course, there is none. The evidence remains circumstantial. In the end we are left with Anne's own cryptic plea to posterity as she stood on the scaffold: 'If any man will meddle with my cause, I pray you to judge the best.'

Hard to know what to make of that problematic word 'innocent.' Was Anne innocent of the trumped-up charges Henry's minions used to get her head on the chopping block? We hardly need Bruce's elusive proof to exonerate Anne of incest - the hideous exaggeration of it bespeaks the typical overreach of tyranny. But reading this very entertaining book gives you the distinct impression Bruce is hinting at a much larger kind of innocence, and there's just no possibility of that. This is the Anne Boleyn, after all, who once said that being England's queen was 'the greatest wealth that is possible to come to any creature living' - and England already had a rightful, beloved queen when she said it. She was adamant selfishness incarnate, willing to let the kingdom, the people, the Church - literally the whole world - blast into flying shards if only she could get what she herself wanted. You can't make heroes out of such stuff, no matter how hard you try. Mary Louise Bruce tries harder than any other biographer I've read, and you should find her book and read it on that account ... but keep and eye on your crown while you're at it.